My organization normally provides customer support over e-mail and over the phone, but in particularly tricky situations we find we need to have an approximation of face-to-face communication. We're trying to find or build a software solution that we can integrate into our site.
Our requirements are that:
- customers shouldn't need to download anything extra or open ports (but yes, Flash is okay)
- the server side components should be self-hosted
- communication should be private and secure
No real requirements other than that. It doesn't even need to be free.
Any recommendations for what's the quickest solution out there for this? Currently I'm looking at rolling our own using red5 or deploying openmeetings but this has got to be a common problem so I'm wondering what other people are doing. There's a whole spectrum of ready-made solutions out there and sadly the simplest ones look geared towards dating chatrooms.
if you need just a simple swf for your site - with camera selection, camera and input/output sound settings, a 'connect' button, basic chat functionality - and with nothing else - imho it will be easier to write 150 - 250 strings of code (if using flex for ui), than to look for a proper solution
your first requirement affects adobe Cirrus (Stratus) - it uses UDP.
how private and secure this connection should be? should streams be encrypted? (RTMPE is and i've heard about free server implementations)